When we go out into the world, we often find ourselves getting absorbed into whichever energetic dynamic and whatever pace is happening around us.
I used to work where the pace was very hard, fast, get it done yesterday, no excuses. I am very sensitive and I also wanted to do my best and make everybody proud and do well at my job. So I neglected myself and I developed a lot of physical pain because I put the needs of the job before my own personal needs as a total being. That’s not healthy. When we choose to do exactly what someone wants us to do and try our 110% best, it doesn’t serve us, and it doesn’t serve anyone actually. Because when we do so, we create these expectations that are up here that are not possible to maintain. So if you are someone who goes to work and you try so so so hard, you work to the absolute max, you think like, “Oh yeah, I’ll work hard, I’ll get a raise, and you know, it’ll be more balanced out after that.”
But what really happens is that you have a couple people working extremely extremely hard and carrying the work of everyone else who is not working so hard. And rarely will you get rewarded for that, and if you do get rewarded for it, it’s really not enough to compensate for the damage that you have done to yourself when you neglect your needs repeatedly over time. When you get into this pace of life that is somebody else’s pace of life, then you go and do other things and you’re carrying that same pace with you. It’s just not fun.
So, my advice to you, if you start a new job, work at the pace that you want to maintain consistently over a long period of time. Do not work your 110% best just because you want to look like you’re the best and get rewarded for it. You really gotta crank that down, it’s really hard for perfectionists, but you don’t want to be in that situation where you’ve been working somewhere for years, you do 90% of the work, you carry a whole team, and that is what everyone expects you to do. They expect you to work this hard to maintain a standard while neglecting yourself, because you never built self-care into your time. Super important.
So what I just described is a kind of like a more fast-paced way of living. That’s how a lot of society is, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
When we are able to create our own spaces in our homes, in our bodies, and live life by the pace that we actually need and want to live by, we can maintain our energy in a way that when we go out into the world, we carry that balance with us and we carry that pace with us.
So if somebody is like right behind us in traffic and beeping at you or something because you’re going a little bit slower than everyone else, it doesn’t affect you and it doesn’t make you just go, “Ahhh oh my gosh!” You’re just like, “breathes It’s fine, what’s the hurry?”
When we’re able to live at a little bit of a slower pace, it really allows our bodies to rest and heal. Because when we’re constantly living in this fast paced way of life, we are in fight-or-flight in every moment. We’re like, “Okay, there’s something here! There’s something here! There’s something here! There’s something here!” And we’re just like running all over the place trying to do all of these things at once and it’s not sustainable. And when we take that pace home with us, we look at our homes, and if there’s a mess, we freak out, then we’re in fight-or-flight in a self-caused way.
And when we carry that same attitude on social media, then you have all these crazy things happening and people reacting and making rash decisions.
We don’t need to be in that place as an entire society. Everyone needs to be able to find and maintain their own peace and their own balance.
And I just want that so badly for everyone watching/reading this. So listen to the Sure Uncertainty Podcast, Episode 31, we talk about energetic maintenance a little bit more into energy dynamics.
You are allowed to live a slower paced life. You are not wrong for taking your time with things. Slow progress is much better than fast progress. Because fast progress is not sustainable over a long period of time. You can go like THIS! and then it just falls off. But if you make a slow approach with something, that builds a continuous healthy habit that sticks in your life and actually gives you a benefit over time. And then you look back and you’re like, “Wow, all these little baby steps every single day, they really add up.”
It’s super important to have that attitude of approaching something every day with a fresh set of eyes and with patience for yourself. Let things unfold as they do, even when it’s slow, and encourage it do, because you don’t want to force yourself to rush something just to get it done. Like, that’s not how life works. You don’t just want to like rush through life as fast as possible, check a bunch of things off a checklist, and die. No, that’s not fun! We don’t need to do that. We just don’t.
You have permission to live your life as slow as you would like to. You are allowed to maintain that in your life. I think that you’ll enjoy it more. Seriously. Especially when you’re working on a project that takes a longer time. We’re in this conditioning of like, get this done, you know, make this social media post, put it out there right now, and then move onto the next time. But that attitude is not sustainable to work on anything long-term. If we’re working on a project that is a lot bigger than just like one post or something, like writing a whole book, that is something that takes consistent effort over time. And if we’re able to slow down a little bit and build these consistent daily habits rather than just trying to rush and get something done, it just serves us so much more in the long-term and in life.
Because when we have that attitude and that pace, we can bring it to anything regardless of what the energy and what the other people are doing around us. And we can bring that energy of peace and of balance. It’s just so much nicer. So you have permission. Live life by your pace, not by somebody else’s pace. Don’t wake up one day and just be like, “How did I get here, this is NOT what I was going for!”
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below. I hope you have a great day!
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